Emotional Contagion Versus Empathy: Article Analysis

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This assignment aims to describe a psychological journal article. The article chosen is ‘Cognitive Strategies for Controlling Emotional Contagion’ by Daniel M. Rempala.

Introduction:

Emotional contagion is defined as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronise facial expressions, vocalisations, postures, and movements with those of another person, and, consequently, to converge emotionally,” (Hatfield, 1993). This main aim of this study was to examine strategies for reducing the likelihood of experiencing negative emotions from others. The discovery of “mirror neurons” has fuelled interest in emotional contagion as it provides a neurological basis for it. A mirror neuron fires both ways when we have observed another person completing a certain action and they are speculated to be involved in empathy, (Acharya & Shukla, 2012).

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Research assumes that being able to experience the emotions of others is very valuable and to experience empathy and contagion, therapists should dedicate themselves to improve people’s abilities, (Rempala, 2013). This study aims to show a different view; experiencing what other people are feeling can be “painful and debilitating” and some people are better off avoiding mirroring other people’s emotions. It also aims to examine techniques used by people to avoid experiencing emotional contagion.

Emotional contagion is different to empathy, though it is a necessary component of empathy. Self-awareness and the ability to distinguish between their experience with the other person’s experience are requirements of empathy. Emotional contagion does not require these and can often lead to personal distress, (Decety & Jackson, 2004). Emotional contagion seems to be higher in females than it is in males. A female’s ability to identify people’s feelings through their facial expressions and non-verbal behaviours is thought to be the cause of this, (Hatfield et al., 1994).

Emotional contagion can be beneficial. It is a way of communication between parents and young children, (Malatesta & Haviland, 1982). The ability to understand people’s emotions can lead to better social competence late in life, (Brown and Dunn, 1996).

Participants were asked to watch two videos and respond to them as if they were a therapist working with a client. The “clients” displayed either a happy or sad reaction. While watching the videos, participants were asked to use one of the following strategies: (a) dissociation, (b) reflection, (c) empathic imagery or (d) no listening strategy (control condition).

The experimenter expected empathic imagery to increase contagion while expecting contagion to be decreased by dissociation and reflection. The results of this study show that contagion was only decreased by dissociation on both measures.

Method:

Once the participants had watched the videos, they were requested to give their therapeutic response to the video and give affective assessments of themselves and the “client”. The responses of the participants were videotaped to record their facial expressions and verbal response. This whole process lasted thirty minutes.

The study consisted of 162 participants, all of whom were undergraduate students at the University of Hawaii. Course credit was given to the students for their participation in the study. Due to language barriers and incorrectly following instructions, 10 students were not included in the analysis of this study. Of the remaining 152 participants, 103 were female and 49 were male with an average age of 23 years old. It was noted that there was a good variation of ethnic composition of the participants, (Rempala, 2013).

Participants received a consent form that briefed them of what would happen during the experiment. They were then given a more detailed set of instructions which were read aloud to them by the experimenter. The participants then got the opportunity to practice what they had to do during the experiment when the experimenter read a sample section of dialogue to them.

The videos used in this experiment were from volunteers who were asked to describe either the happiest or saddest day of their life. A total of 24 clips were recorded. Undergraduate research assistants reviewed all of the video clips in order to rate the happiness or sadness of the videos. The three happiest and saddest videos were used, which was later reduced to two videos: one male and one female for each emotion.

Participants received four listening instructions. These instructions were dissociation, reflection, empathic imagery and control condition. Dissociation involves removing yourself from the situation and looking at it from a different perspective. Reflection involves attempting to understand how the client is feeling and how that affects you. Empathic imagery involves attempting to visualise being involved in the situation and how the client felt. To test if the participants followed the instructions correctly, a manipulation check was conducted at the end of the experiment. Participants were asked to rewrite the instructions they were given once their copy of the instructions had been removed. If their answers were unrelated to the task, they were considered to have failed the manipulation check.

The two measures of emotional contagion in this study were self-reported contagion, which attempts to show the congruity between the participant and the client, and facial affect contagion. These were measured by filling out a self-report and having their expressions videotaped. The three measures of engagement were empathy, genuineness and positive regard. These were measured based on ratings from verbal responses.

Results:

Four hypotheses were tested. Hypothesis 1 predicted that emotional contagion would be increased by the empathic imagery condition. Hypothesis 2 predicted that emotional contagion would be decreased by the dissociation and hypothesis 3 predicted that emotional contagion would be reduced by reflection conditions. Hypothesis 4 predicted that contagion would be reduced by all conditions. These hypotheses were tested using ANOVAs. An ANOVA is an analysis of variance, (Oxford Dictionary, 2018).

According to the ANOVA that was carried out on self-reported contagion, there was a significant effect on mood. The participants displayed more contagion during the sad video than they did during the happy video. The contrast analyses also showed that dissociation was less than the control condition.

The ANOVA used to analyse facial affect contagion showed that there was a significant correlation between mood and instruction. Dissociation was the only instruction condition that showed a greater contagion for the happy video clips. All other instruction conditions showed a higher contagion for the sad videos. The contrast analyses show that all three instruction conditions were less than the control condition, with empathic imagery showing the lowest contagion. The results show that there is a correlation between self-reported contagion and facial affect contagion. This result was expected as facial affect contagion shows the presence of emotiont and the degree of emotion is indicated by self-reported contagion.

The hypotheses predicted that engagement would be increased by the empathic imagery and reflection conditions and would be decreased by dissociation. These ideas were tested using ANOVAs. The independent variables used were instruction, gender of participant and mood. Contrast analyses were used for each ANOVA for the instruction variable. The ANOVA which used empathy as the dependent variable showed that all experimental instruction conditions were greater than the control. According to the contrast analyses, participants displayed more empathy in the dissociation condition, the reflection condition and the empathic imagery condition than they did in the control condition.

Discussion:

This study proves that emotional contagion can be impacted by emotional regulation strategies. Specific effects hypotheses were only partially supported by this study. Contagion was expected to be increased by empathic imagery. There was a significant difference between empathic imagery and the control in facial affect contagion, with empathic imagery showing a reduction in facial affect contagion.

Contagion was expected to decrease by dissociation, and it was lower than the control on both measures. This is the only condition to produce greater scores of engagement for both measures though it was expected to reduce engagement. The reflection condition was the only one that followed the predicted pattern of results. It was expected to decrease contagion and increase engagement, (Rempala, 2013).

According to the results, empathic imagery and reflection did not display any significant difference from the control condition. All strategies for the facial affect variable reduced contagion which matched the hypothesis. The idea that cognitive strategies can disrupt emotional contagion is supported by the fact that the effects of all three strategies were similar.

This study has multiple limitations. External validity was quite low meaning that this study cannot be generalised to the people outside of the study. The videos were shorter than a typical therapy session and in therapy, clients talk to a person rather than a computer screen. Also, the participants in this study had limited knowledge on clinical psychology as they were all undergraduate students. This cannot represent a sample of professionals in this line of research.

Another limitation is the lack of facial expressions. This could be caused by the anxiety of being on camera or that the video clip wasn’t stimulating enough to evoke a lot of emotion. A final problem is that two participants had to be excused during the negative video clips as they found them too upsetting.

Conclusion:

To conclude, despite the limitations, this study shows support for the hypotheses that multiple strategies can be used to decrease emotional contagion. These strategies include dissociation, reflection and empathic imagery.

References:

  1. Acharya, S., & Shukla, S. (2012). Mirror neurons: Enigma of the metaphysical modular brain. Journal of Natural Science, Biology, and Medicine, 3(2), 118-124. doi:10.4103/0976-9668.101878
  2. ANOVA [Def. 1]. (n.d.). In Oxford Dictionary Online, Retrieved 20 November 2018, from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/anova
  3. Carol Zander Malatesta, & Jeannette M. Haviland. (1982). Learning display rules: The socialization of emotion expression in infancy. Child Development, 53(4), 991-1003. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1982.tb01363.x
  4. Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2004). The functional architecture of human empathy. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 3(2), 71-100. doi:10.1177/1534582304267187
  5. Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96-100. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.ep10770953
  6. Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1994). Emotional contagion (1. publ. ed.). Cambridge u.a: Cambridge Univ. Press u.a.
  7. Jane R. Brown, & Judy Dunn. (1996). Continuities in emotion understanding from three to six years. Child Development, 67(3), 789-802. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1996.tb01764.x
  8. Rempala, D. M. (2013). Cognitive strategies for controlling emotional contagion. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43(7), 1528-1537. doi:10.1111/jasp.12146

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